`Cover To Cover' Promotional, Formulaic

New `Cover To Cover' Weak Vehicle For King

July 30, 1991|By JAMES ENDRST; Courant TV Critic Column: NBC

It's always nice to write a local-boy-or-girl-makes-good story. But this isn't going to be one of them -- at least not based on Monday's first installment of "Cover to Cover," a NBC News daytime information show for women featuring former WFSB (Channel 3) anchorwoman Gayle King as co-host.

Right now the best thing that can be said about this remarkably thin half-hour -- even by daytime TV's liberal standards -- is that it's not King's fault.

Produced in partnership with such magazines as Ladies Home Journal, Glamour, McCalls, Family Circle, Parents, Consumer Reports, Money, Travel & Leisure, American Health and others, the program is a wall-to-wall plug for the publications involved.

King is just fine, easing into a made-to-order format that considers her background. As always she talks too much with her hands, so much that it appears she is signing the program for the hearing-impaired. Her co-host, former Cleveland anchorwoman Robin Wagner, is so chirpy it's as though she was trained at the "Real People" school of broadcasting.

On the face of it, "Cover to Cover" wouldn't be such a bad idea if we hadn't seen most of this before on everything from the "Today" show to the kind of local live-at-5 news shows. Particularly disturbing are the kind of editorial ties that bind "Cover to Cover."

Set against a studied, fern-laden, homey backdrop so familiar to daytime television you barely notice it, "Cover to Cover" is a public-relations dream come true. In fact, this highly formulaic program does everything but give you subscription rates and a toll-free number for each of the publications.

Still, Wagner enthusiastically insists now that "Cover to Cover" is on the air, "You don't even have to go to the doctor's office anymore to see all these magazines." As the show opens, King and Wagner, in tweedledum, tweedledee fashion, explain that "Cover to Cover" is all about "what's really important to us as American women -- our families, our health and how we relate to the people we love, how we spend our time and our money, the way we look and

the food we eat plus lots more, including the stories of real people -- some famous and some you've never heard of before -- who will inspire all of us."

Monday's opener (all shows are prerecorded) began with a story taken from Ladies Home Journal about two parents whose son was diagnosed with an incurable illness but whose perseverance in finding the right doctor saved his life.

The interview with the principals, conducted by King, fell flat.

Next up was a TV translation of Glamour magazine's popular fashion do's and don'ts with Wagner and King talking with Glamour's senior fashion editor. In a lame attempt to mimic the magazine, models paraded around holding black bars over their eyes to protect their identities.

And then there was the first of a four-part series on diet plans and pills that, like the do's and don'ts segment, emphasizes information and practical application but doesn't seem to devote enough time to anything to make you trust the information.

In fact, the show seems to move in that half-interested way one flips through magazines in waiting rooms, longing for the words, "The doctor will see you now."